Center For Watershed Protection Highlights Success Stories In Pennsylvania

The nonprofit Center for Watershed Protection Wednesday highlighted three of its success stories working in Pennsylvania to restore and protect watersheds.

Helping Municipalities With MS4s

The Center helped the Department of Environmental Protection implement its Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems (MS4) program to reduce nonpoint source pollution by assisting several counties and organizations to coordinate their pollution reduction efforts.

Close to 1,000 municipalities have MS4s that will be regulated as of 2018, with various levels of permit requirements —ranging from complex mapping, investigating the sources of stream impairments, and stormwater modeling, to the design and installation of best management practices (BMPs) — all of which must be completed within a short window of time.

Among those helped by the Center were Berks, Blair, Lancaster, Lebanon and York counties and a coalition of municipalities in the Wyomissing Creek Watershed in Berks County.

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William Penn Foundation Delaware Initiative

As part of its Delaware Watershed Initiative, the William Penn Foundation to help pull together a list of over 350 projects and a summary of milestones and status updates of over 40 organizations within the Delaware Watershed clusters used by the Foundation.

The Center also provided a set of recommendations for streamlining efforts to track progress and developing consistent reporting metrics for each type of project.

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Detect, Eliminating Illicit Discharges

Under Pennsylvania’s Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) Program, one of the six elements that permittees are required to address in their stormwater management programs is Illicit Discharge Detection and Elimination (IDDE).

The Center provided an IDDE manual and provided seven training sessions for municipalities in Berks, Delaware, Lancaster, Lehigh and Montgomery counties.

The Center also worked with the Lehigh County Conservation District, a coalition of 26 municipalities, to introduce illicit discharge regulations and begin creating IDDE programs.

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For more information on programs, training, upcoming events, visit the Center for Watershed Protection website, visit the Center’s Blog and follow on Twitter.